N Minus 1

Keith Gessen writes the sort of book he’s always hated.

All the Sad Young Literary Men
Keith Gessen
Viking, 2008
242 pages, $24.95

Shortly after the publication last month of All the Sad Young Literary Men, its prologue was
posted on the n+1 website as an enticement to
potential readers. in a refreshing burst of honesty, it bore the tags “cosmopolitanism,” “nostalgia,” “solidarity,” and “money.” With the possible
exception of “solidarity,” these would be equally
valid descriptions of author Keith Gessen’s career.
Formal analysis of the work is made more difficult
because Gessen, editor-in-chief of the aforementioned literary journal, rests so much of his academic street-cred on what he is not. From its first
issue in 2004, n+1 defined its intellectual merit in
relation to its contemporaries, positioning itself
as a publication diametrically opposed to the
beliefs of its generation.

This generation has been defined by a set of
authors, typified by the McSweeney’s publishing clique and its founder Dave Eggers,
who claimed that, on some level, everyone
should write—a point of view that was, in
the view of n+1, needlessly egalitarian.
“Subliterary,” sniffed n+1 in an early appraisal of the
body of work that emerged from these
high-concept, optimistic
theories, and Gessen and
his colleagues have spent
the four years since the
magazine’s launch upholding an unapologetically elitist point of view with
relentless barrages of criticism issued from on
high.

Do McSweeney’s writers title their novels with
exclamation points and leave whole pages blank
as displays of youthful vim? Such semi-juvenile
literary devices to reinvigorate the medium are
“regressive,” snapped Gessen and his gang of Ivy
Leaguers. McSweeney’s books are marked with a
kind of boundless enthusiasm for bending the literary form; scattered throughout are illustrations,
digressions, and characters that break the fourth
wall to discuss the merits of the book directly with
the reader. The response was predictable: “To wear
credulity as one’s badge of intellect is not to be a
thinker as such.”

As a result of Gessen’s persistent assault on the
McSweeney’s style, his ideology has, to some degree,
overshadowed any other element of his public persona. And since his book is so firmly rooted in its
milieu—the introduction uses the phrase “it was
1998” five times and has a similarly obsessive sense
of place, citing street names and specific Park Slope
intersections—it’s hard to
read it as anything less than
a statement of the author’s
personal priorities in literature and in life, if the
two can even be safely separated.

But snark is cheap—and
for all his ambition, Gessen somehow manages to fall into the trap of
McSweeney’s-esque gimmickry with
an unself-consciousness that his own
literary alter-ego would probably condemn. He’s packed the first chapter
of his new book with blurred pictures
of email inboxes, Monica Lewinsky,
and a chart comparing two of the main
characters. No drawing of a stapler had
been found at press time, although it’s
possible that the pages of our review copy weren’t
properly cut. In a particularly striking moment
of déjà vu, Gessen’s neurotic character sam worries obsessively that a sex columnist will publish
details of their tryst in her weekly output–a scenario that can also be found (substituting a sexologist for a sex columnist) on page 335 of Eggers’s
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Shadowing Gessen’s own life closely, the book’s
characters are fairly well-off, very well-educated
intellectuals; one was born in Russia (as he was),
attended Harvard (as he did) and got an MFA at
Syracuse (as he did); one of them is even named
“Keith” (as he is). All are sexually
and intellectually frustrated
and flounder in their attempts
to overcome their discontent
with overambitious academic
and libidinal pursuits. if the
book were longer, it would be
safe to guess that they would go
on to start a hyper-aggressive
lit-crit journal. Gessen weaves
together the lives of his three
main characters–Sam, Keith,
Mark–to grant us some insight
into the lives of over-educated
Ivy League graduates who spend their days shotgunning a half-dozen beers and passing out on strange
couches, self-made outcasts who are alienated from
the world because it doesn’t recognize their genius
in the way that the academy had led them to believe
it would.

Ironically, Gessen’s novel has touched a popular
chord. McSweeney’s sets out to appeal to the precollegiate set, but it’s All the Sad Young Literary
Men that is currently ranked #31 on Amazon’s
“teens” list (compare to #94 in “literature”).
And although the novel tries to eke out a distinctive narrative style, broad swaths of it are cringeworthy (“Sorrow touched me; I was touched, on
East 80th Street, by sorrow”) or bank heavily on
cliché: “She was going to med school, and I—I was
going to write.” The burden of actually sitting
down and producing a quality work, as it turns
out, is a little heavier than the stones that Gessen
periodically hurls in the general direction of his
ideological targets.

This is not to discredit the novel’s very genuine angst, nor to say that it doesn’t have some
very strong points to make. Gessen reserves his
eloquence for the times when his protagonists
persevere against remarkable odds or gain a better understanding of how to move forward and
improve upon the lives that they find so deeply
unpleasant. The problem is that, upon uncovering these larger life truths, the eponymous sad
young literary men feel compelled to relate them
as incompetently as possible; they trip over their
words to explain a new philosophy to an attractive
young co-ed before dousing her in vodka and their
prominent sexual failings. Aggravating this is the
fact that the only thread linking the main characters of the book, aside from
a general angst and similar, constantly harped-upon
academic backgrounds, is
that they’ve slept with the
same three women. All of the
women are full-lipped and
desirable but intellectually
inferior in Gessen’s telling–
and therefore easily swayed
by the protagonists’ powers
of persuasion.

The shallowness of these
portraits of the artists as
young men emphasize the book’s central problem: Despite all of Gessen’s cries for serious,
intellectual writing in the pages of his critical
journal, All The Sad Young Literary Men doesn’t
feel like an attempt to write a serious novel.
While the book has some real points of clarity,
they’re hard to find amidst the postering and self-indulgence. When a critic whose broadsides are
as widely-read as Gessen’s opts to descend from
his lofty perch, he’s likely to find the nature of his
debt to the reading public has shifted; the fans
demand something truly remarkable, and not just
lazy navel-gazing. As James Wood pointed out
while attacking n+1 in its own pages, “it is easier
to criticize than to propose.” It’s incumbent upon
Gessen to one-up his generational adversaries,
and to substitute meaningful commentary for the
idealism and open-mindedness that his clique
maligns. Fortunately for his detractors, the book
is, as Dave Eggers described his own first novel,
“pretty uneven.”